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What Bush Knew, and Romney Doesn’t

September 18, 2012 1:35 pmSeptember 18, 2012 1:35 pm

I used my Campaign Stops column last week to make the case (not for the first time) that Mitt Romney is struggling to defeat Barack Obama in large part because the public’s memory of how the Bush era ended remains a major drag on the Republican Party’s political prospects, and Romney hasn’t done nearly enough to define himself as a post-Bush figure. But with the whole political world talking about the leaked fundraiser tape in which Romney channels an inaccurate and self-defeating right-wing talking point to basically write off 47 percent of America as irresponsible, dependent, guaranteed-to-vote Obama moochers, it’s worth pointing out that the current Republican nominee has also conspicuously failing to learn from George W. Bush’s substantial political successes.

What the younger Bush did while running for president in 2000 was uncomplicated, disciplined, and effective. He picked a few issues — education, in particular, but also health care and immigration and poverty — where voters trusted Democrats more than Republicans and made it his business to talk about them almost as often as he talked about traditional Republican strengths like taxes and defense. He spoke consistently about bipartisanship and changing the tone in Washington, constantly invoking his own record in Texas as an example. When he championed conservative ideas, he stressed their impact on the middle class and the working poor, rather than just lionizing entrepreneurs and businessmen. When he showed an unconventional side — on immigration reform, say, or faith-based initiatives — the aim was always to make the G.O.P. seem as inclusive as possible, and to cast himself as a president for all Americans, even constituencies that would never vote for him.

He campaigned, in other words, in a way designed to reassure non-ideological voters that he cared about the issues that they cared about, and that he would be something other than a down-the-line ideologue if elected. In the process, he created clear distance between himself and the unpopular national Republican leadership (Gingrich, Dole, his own father) that preceded him. And he also put some distance between himself and what might have otherwise been an obvious liberal line of attack — that he was an out-of-touch Republican fortunate son, with no understanding of ordinary people’s lives and struggles.

The success of this strategy tends to be underappreciated because Bush fell just short in the popular vote in 2000 and then won more on terrorism than on domestic policy in 2004. But when you consider the edge that Gore should have had as the heir to the Clinton boom and compare Bush’s 2000 performance to every other Republican nominee in the last two decades — his father, Bob Dole, John McCain, and now perhaps Romney as well — his approach looks pretty impressive. (Republicans like to blame Perot for their poor showing in 1992 and 1996, but the Perot vote would have probably broken for Clinton or split down the middle, and anyway his candidacy was a symptom of G.O.P. unpopularity, not its cause.) As Reihan Salam and I argued in our 2008 book “Grand New Party,” the demographics of Bush’s near-majority in 2000 and majority in 2004 suggested a plausible outline for a post-Reagan right-of-center coalition: One that would make up for the gradual leftward tilt of former Rockefeller Republicans by winning more working class whites and more middle-class Hispanics, and one that would compensate for G.O.P. weakness along the Pacific Coast and the Acela corridor by making deeper inroads in the Southwest and Middle West.

Now of course that coalition fell apart: Bush’s policies didn’t deliver as promised, he presided over a series of foreign and domestic debacles, and he left office in the midst of an economic meltdown. And the stink of failure around Bushism produced an understandable backlash on the right against “compassionate conservatism” and all its works.

But those failures and that backlash did not change the basic realities of national coalition-building; it just required some rethinking about what kind of policy mix a center-right coalition should pursue. Nor did it make it impossible for a Republican presidential candidate to pivot toward the center after a primary campaign; it just changed the issues that such a pivot would have needed to focus on and exploit.

So Mitt Romney was never going to be to run for president as the candidate of, say, comprehensive immigration reform and an individual mandate to purchase health insurance; his post-Bush base would not allow it. (And for good reason!) But he could have run for president, as various right-of-center voices have pointed out, as the candidate of a kind of pro-market populism — as a foe of “bigness” on Wall Street and Washington alike, as a champion of tax policy that favored families as well as entrepreneurs, as a champion of a more-than-notional replacement for the Obama health care bill, and so forth. This kind of agenda wouldn’t have represented a repudiation of the Tea Party spirit. It just would have sifted through the Tea Party’s rather inchoate mix of ideological impulses and policy prescriptions, emphasizing some and de-emphasizing others, and looking for the places where right-wing populism and the mainstream intersect.

There were times during the primary campaign when it seemed like Romney intended to do just that. He talked constantly about the middle class, and refused to jump on the flat tax bandwagon. He declined to savage the president as a socialist. He even refused to repudiate his Massachusetts health care bill, which was every political consultant save Stuart Stevens apparently told him had to be abandoned outright if he wanted to win over the party’s base. He did end up being boxed into an implausible across-the-board tax cut, but that was a pander that could have been finessed into an effective general-election message without too much difficulty.

But after months and months of general election campaigning, no such message has emerged. And in its absence, Romney finds himself conducting a winnable (yes, still) campaign from the weakest possible position. By branding himself as a generic Republican with no particularly unconventional ideas of his own, he’s managed to associate himself with all the party’s Bush-era failures, while imitating none of its success.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.